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ers to count a wife’s income when eval-
uating borrowers; the deregulation of
the mortgage lending industry began in
1980. With two wage earners and low
down payments, middle-class families
took on bigger mortgages and contrib-
uted to an increase in the cost of hous-
ing, especially when families with chil-
dren paid a premium for property in
school districts with high test scores. Fi-
nancial crisis, for a two-income family,
usually means having to live, quite sud-
denly, on one income. In these straits,
families with children tend to totter on
the edge of ruin. “Having a child is now
the single best predictor that a woman
will end up in financial collapse,” War-
ren and Tyagi reported. Between 1981
and 2001, the number of women filing
for bankruptcy rose more than six hun-
dred per cent.
Warren entered the world of policy-
making when, in 1995, she was ap-
pointed to serve on the National Bank-
ruptcy Review Commission, during the
Clinton Administration. She found the
work thrilling and the results madden-
ing. She describes a report, sponsored by
the banking industry, alleging that bank-
ruptcy protection amounted to a five-
hundred-and-fifty-dollar “hidden tax”
levied on every hardworking American
family: “I’d spent nearly twenty years
sweating over every detail in a string of
serious academic studies, agonizing over
sample sizes and statistical significance
to make certain that whatever I reported
was exactly right. Now the banks just
wrote a check, commis-
sioned a friendly study, and
purchased their own facts.”
Warren’s frustration was
part of what led her to seek
a broader audience for her
research by writing “The
Two-Income Trap,” which
led to appearances on the
“Today” show and “Dr.
Phil,” where she spoke with
a family struggling with debt. “Year in
and year out, I’d been fighting as hard as
I could,” Warren writes. “But by spend-
ing a few minutes talking to that family
on Dr. Phil’s show—and to about six
million other people who were looking
on—I might have done more good than
in an entire year as a professor.”
Nevertheless, the solutions that War-
ren has proposed often fail to convince.
To counter both the crisis in public ed-
ucation and the high cost of housing,
Warren and Tyagi recommend a uni-
versal public-school voucher system in
which parents could send their kids to
any public school: “An all-voucher sys-
tem would be a shock to the educa-
tional system, but the shakeout might
be just what the system needs.” Yes,
that would be a shock. It would also be
reckless.
In 2008, Warren joined a five-person
congressional-oversight panel whose
creation was mandated by the seven-
hundred-billion-dollar bailout. She
found that thrilling and maddening,
too. In the spring of 2009, after the
panel issued its third report, critical of
the bailout, Larry Summers took War-
ren out to dinner in Washington and,
she recalls, told her that she had a choice
to make. She could be an insider or an
outsider, but if she was going to be an
insider she needed to understand one
unbreakable rule about insiders: “They
don’t criticize other insiders.” That’s
about when Warren went on the Jon
Stewart show, and you get the sense
that, over that dinner, she decided to
run for office.
Elizabeth Warren has a case to make
about what bankers do with other
people’s money; she’s been making it
for twenty-five years. It’s hardly un-
contested, but it rests on collaborative,
peer-reviewed, empirical research. Get-
ting that argument across to voters in
2012 required a great deal of compression
and simplification, even more than was
required to write “The Two-Income
Trap,” but Warren’s expertise—her au-
thority as an intellectual—also helped
get her elected. Running against Scott
Brown, she had to tell a stump-size story
about her life, a story that includes this
fact: for a time, she was a single mother.
That story helped get her elected.
My life explains my fight has been the
argument of every American political bi-
ography for a long time. When you’re
grafting a life story onto a political argu-
ment, there will always be places where
the grain runs in different directions. (An
argument that the system is rigged tends
to be somewhat undermined, for in-
stance, by the success of the person
pointing that out.) And, particularly for
women with children, campaign biogra-
phy can be a snare. When Wendy Davis
decided to run for governor of Texas, her
consultants advised her to tell the story of
how she started out as a single mother
before becoming a lawyer; conservatives
accused her of having abandoned her
children. This snare exists because polit-
ical biography as a genre follows conven-
tions whose origins lie with Andrew
Jackson, in the early nineteenth century,
long before women gained the right to
vote or to hold office. Discrimination is
the afterlife of discredited ideas. By the
standards applied to Davis, who left her
two young daughters with their father so
that she could go to law school, most
candidates elected to office in the United
States in the past two centuries aban-
doned their children.
But there’s another snare here: the
danger of adopting, in place of the con-
ventions of the Andrew Jackson’s-boot-
straps political biography, the newer
conventions of diaper-pin Girl Jackson-
ianism. Political consultants appear to be
eager to advise their female candidates to
include, when telling the story of their
lives, gauzy intimacies, silly-little-me
confessions of domestic ineptitude, stagy
performances of maternal devotion, and
the shameless trotting out of twinkle-
eyed tots. In “A Fighting Chance,” War-
ren argues that the federal government
has allowed an unregulated financial in-
dustry to prey on the middle class; she
also writes no small amount about peach
cobbler and burned frying pans. Still, she
is not adorable; instead, she’s fierce in her
affections. “Sometimes, late at night,
when the house was quiet, I’d scoop La-
vinia out of her crib and hold her,” she
writes, referring to one of her grandchil-
dren. “Not because she needed it but be-
cause I did.”
Warren is also smart enough to use the
conventions of political biography, old
and new, to insist on the existence of a re-
lationship between caring for other peo-
ple and caring about politics. Her brief is
really about the abandonment of children,
not by women who go to school or to
work but by legislatures and courts that
have allowed the nation’s social and eco-
nomic policies to be made by corporations
and bankers. Writing about her children
and grandchildren—rocking that baby—
is more than the place where Warren
leaves Brandeis behind. It’s an argument
about where our real debts lie. 
Critics Lepore Warren 04_21_14.L [Print].indd 101
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